Devil May Care (31 page)

Bond barely had time to telephone Scarlett’s office, where he left a message – ‘Crillon lobby at six thirty tomorrow’ – before the police were on the scene. He spent most of the afternoon explaining to them what had happened. A suicide, a bizarre accident . . . At five o’clock he persuaded them to call Rene´ Mathis, who was happy to vouch for Bond’s good name in person.

It was six thirty by the time the paperwork was finished and the two men stood on the quai des Orfe`vres.

‘I would love to . . . But I . . .’ said Mathis, looking at his watch.

‘Me too,’ said Bond. ‘Business.’

‘Lunch on Monday,’ said Mathis. ‘ That same place. In the rue du Cherche Midi.’

‘I’ll see you there at one,’ said Bond.

They shook hands and went their different ways. Bond hailed a taxi – a black Citroe¨n DS – which rolled him smoothly through the heavy traffic of the

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Champs-E

´ lyse´es and on to the George V. It was five to seven as he crossed the great marble-floored lobby with its ornate tables groaning beneath giant glass vases of lilies.

‘Room five eight six, please,’ he said to the clerk. There was a muted telephone conversation.

‘Yes, Monsieur, you are expected. The elevator is that way and to the left.’

The George V was a witty choice for this meeting, Bond reflected, as he jabbed the number-five button inside the lift – named after the British king who had instigated the Entente Cordiale. How cordial would this meeting be? He knew most of the other double-Os by name or by sight, but contact was kept to a minimum for security reasons.

Ah, well, he thought, as he went down the softly carpeted corridor to room 586. The first few months in the job could be difficult. He would do his best to be polite. He knocked on the door. There was no answer. He tried the handle, and the unlocked door opened into a darkened room. Everything was exactly as they had always been taught. What light there was shone into his eyes, leaving the rest of the room in shadow, but as he closed the door behind him Bond knew exactly what he would see. Without turning, he said,

‘Hello, Scarlett.’

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‘Hello, James. We seem to have met a day early.’

She stood up from the chair in the darkest corner, where she had been sitting, and turned the lamp away from him. She reached for a switch in the panelling, and the room returned to a normal, muted lighting. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress, black stockings and a modest silver necklace. She had the red lip colour she had worn as Mrs Larissa Rossi when he first set eyes on her in Rome. Her hair was glowing and clean on her bare shoulders.

Yet she looked, for the first time since he had known her, ill at ease. She looked frightened.

‘I’m so sorry, James.’ She took a hesitant step towards him. ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with you.’

Bond smiled. ‘It’s all right.’

‘When did you know?’ Her voice was tight with anxiety – the dread of one who fears the loss of love. Bond sighed deeply. ‘When I walked into this room. But all along, really.’

‘Which?’

‘Both.’

Bond began to laugh and found it hard to stop. The tension of the preceding days seemed to pour out of him.

Then, with a deep inhalation, he controlled himself. ‘I think the moment when you shot clean

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through the electric cable in the hangar at Noshahr

. . . That was when I first suspected.’

Scarlett pouted. ‘It was very close.’

‘Not that close.’

‘Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry. I’d spent the week before firing in two new Walthers on the range. My eye was in. Can you forgive me?’

‘I don’t know yet, Scarlett.’ Bond sat down on the velvet-upholstered sofa and lit a cigarette. He put his feet up on the coffee-table as he exhaled. ‘I’ll have to forgive myself first. You gave me enough clues. The way you left no shadow when you hid outside the building in the boatyard. The way you smelt of fresh lily-of-the-valley when I kissed you in Noshahr –

though you were meant to have come direct from the airport in Tehran in an overheated car.’

Scarlett looked down. ‘I wanted to be nice for you. I’d actually been in Noshahr for a day. Oh God, James, I feel terrible. I hated misleading you, I just – ’

‘Why did M send you?’

‘It was my first assignment as a double-O. He thought I might need help. He wanted to break me in easily.’

‘And he thought I might need help, too,’ said Bond, ruefully.

‘Only because there was too much for one person

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to do. And you had . . . You’d had a bad time. Tokyo and . . .’

Scarlett took another step closer. Bond felt the light touch of her hand on his. ‘And after all, James,’

she said, ‘we made a pretty good job of it. Didn’t we?’

‘And the way you put on a parachute,’ said Bond.

‘Without training, people are all thumbs.’

‘I’m so very sorry, James. It had to be that way. Those were my orders. M knew you’d never consent to having me along if you knew. But he wanted you back. He needs you.’

‘No wonder the old man looked so shifty when he briefed me. And Poppy?’

Scarlett shook her head. ‘Every man’s fantasy, James. Twins.’

‘How did you do the birthmark?’

‘ Tea and pomegranate juice.’

‘And the different eye colours?’

‘You noticed! I wasn’t sure men took these things in. Coloured contact lenses.’

‘I didn’t know you could buy such things.’

‘You can’t. Q section made them for me. It helped with the dissimilar-twin story, because identicals have the same eye colour.’

‘And what did you do that afternoon in Moscow, when I thought you were at the embassy?’

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‘I just went to another park and stayed out of sight. I had to keep the story going till the end.’

Bond smiled. ‘You’re one hell of an actress. You were so like yourself . . . And yet somehow not. And Mrs Rossi, too. Larissa.’

‘I know. I had two years at stage school from when I was twenty-one. It was one of the things that got me the job. That and speaking Russian.’

‘ The way you turned your back on me in the cell when I told you we were leaving Poppy behind, so you could fake your sobs without me seeing your face . . .’

Scarlett was so close that he could smell her skin, the faintest scent of Guerlain. Her eyes were looking up into his, pleading, brimming with tears. Rejecting an impulse to weaken, Bond stood up, ground out his cigarette and went over to the window.

‘What the hell was M thinking?’ he said.

‘I told you,’ said Scarlett, desperately. ‘He wanted you back. My predecessor was dead. 009 was acting up – close to a breakdown, they thought. M needed your experience and your strength. But he wasn’t sure you still had the will, the desire.’

‘It’s against all normal practice,’ said Bond. ‘How much did he brief you? You seemed to know more about Gorner than I did.’

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‘Most of it I just made up,’ said Scarlett. ‘M gave me a free hand with the cover story. He said he didn’t need to know. He just told me to draw you in. He said I would find you . . . indispensable. And I did.’

‘And he mentioned my Achilles’ heel.’

‘Women? Darling, everyone knows that. It was the first thing Felix told me. ‘‘Mention the broad and the

’coon’ll be treed.’’ What on earth does that mean by the way?’

‘It’s a raccoon, I suppose. Some Davy Crockett thing.’

‘It’s even on your SMERSH dossier, I’m told, under ‘‘Weaknesses’’.’

Bond looked back at Scarlett’s anxious face. ‘How much of the stuff you told me about Gorner and your father was true?’

‘Some. Please, James, just – ’

‘How much?’

‘My father was a don at Oxford at the time, but he never knew Gorner. My father taught music. Not a Gorner speciality.’

‘And his hatred of Britain?’

‘I don’t really know how that started. But I was delighted when he spouted all that anti-British stuff, of course.’

Bond breathed in deeply and looked back across

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the opulent hotel room at this woman in her black velvet dress, the force of her beauty checked only by the anguish in her eyes. Then he thought of all they had been through and how she had never once flinched or let him down. He took two hesitant steps towards her and saw her upper lip stiffen in reflexive arousal, as he had first seen it in Larissa Rossi in Rome.

And whatever else was true or false, he knew this girl did love him. He reached out and wrapped his arms round her. She sighed and clamped her lips to his mouth while his hands slid down her dress and pulled her by the hips roughly against him. When they had kissed for a minute, Bond said,

‘Now we’re going to order dinner. Exactly as we described.’

Scarlett went to the telephone. There were tears of relief in the corners of her eyes. ‘Shall we skip the eggs Benedict?’ she said.

‘Just this once. But I’d like a real drink first. A jug of martinis.’

Scarlett began to order rapidly. ‘What year Chaˆteau Batailley do you want?’

‘ ’Forty-five will do,’ said Bond.

‘ They’re sending out for that vintage. Dinner will be up in half an hour.’

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‘ Time enough,’ said Bond. ‘Now come here. My boss told me to ‘‘press the flesh’’ and I don’t like to disobey orders.’

The belle-e´poque furnishings of the room included mirrors on the doors of the many wardrobes, as well as one above the marble fireplace. Bond watched Scarlett as she undressed, slipping out of the black dress, the stockings and the black underwear. There were four, eight, sixteen of her. She was multiplied in reflection, stretched to infinity in the soft light of the warm hotel room.

‘In the words of one of Felix Leiter’s bosses,’ said Bond, hoarsely, ‘we are in a wilderness of mirrors.’

Then he ran his hands over Scarlett’s naked body and took her roughly, quickly, with the pent-up urgency of their long and chaste association. Scarlett was in the bath when the dinner arrived, and Bond took a martini through to her.

‘I also brought you this,’ he said, taking a bottle of Floris gardenia bath essence from his pocket.

‘So it’s just as we planned.’ Scarlett smiled from the bath as she sprinkled some drops into the water. Bond tipped a glassful of the icy martini down his throat and sighed with happiness as he wheeled the room-service trolley to the bed. He took off his own

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clothes and put on the white towelling robe from the bathroom door.

He lay back on the plump pillows and sucked the smoke of a Chesterfield deep into his lungs, then exhaled in a blissful stream, while Scarlett, naked as she had promised, prepared the caviar and the sole meunie`re. She sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, looking at him with her wide brown eyes, as though she feared he might disappear.

Bond drained the Bollinger. ‘I miss Poppy,’ he said. ‘She was so . . . demure. Surprisingly so, for such a wild child.’

‘Whereas Scarlett, who as a banker you’d expect to be restrained – ’

‘Is anything but.’

‘And which one,’ said Scarlett, ‘would you like me to be tonight?’

‘I think Poppy till midnight,’ said Bond, drawing the cork on the Chaˆteau Batailley, ‘but from then on pure, uninhibited Scarlett.’

They talked through the events of the past week over dinner. Bond told her of his final encounter with Gorner as she cleared away the plates and glasses. Scarlett took the last of the champagne and slipped under the bedclothes, leaning back next to Bond against the pillows. ‘What will happen to me, James?’

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‘What do you mean?’

‘My job. I mean, on my very first assignment, I’ve made the terrible mistake of having an office romance.’

Bond got off the bed, stood up and walked to the window. He was aware of how much his body ached

– his rib, his shoulder, his hip, almost all his muscles. Beneath him he could see the City of Light stretched out from the distant place de la Concorde, up through the Ope´ra and Pigalle to the terrible tower blocks of the northern
banlieue
.

He pulled the curtains together tightly, thinking of M, and Julian Burton, the new psychological-fitness trainer, Loelia Ponsonby, Moneypenny and all the others.

‘Some office,’ he said, returning to the bed.

‘Yes,’ said Scarlett, smiling as she pulled back the covers to reveal her naked body – pink from the bath, clean, soft and waiting for him. ‘And some romance.’

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Acknowledgements

Hardware: James Holland, Mark Lanyon, Rachel Organ, Lt.-Col. John Starling, Rowland White. For the Ekranoplan, see autospeed.com and www.se-tech nology.com/wig

Software: Atussa Cross, Hazel Orme.

Elsewhere: Andrew Burke/Lonely Planet; Patrice Hoffmann.

Bondage: Henry Chancellor, Zoe Watkins, Simon Winder.

With thanks

SF

London, 28 May 2008

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